The Devil's Interval
by LogicalDragons
Summary: Hermione Granger is summoned back to Hogwarts as part of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement in order to investigate a series of murders. While there, she encounters a strange man claiming to be a skilled musician. He seems nice enough, but it soon becomes obvious that he is hiding a dark secret. Still, Hermione begins to find herself strangely attracted to this man.
1. The Lasting Question

**Rated M for bloody violence and questionably irreverent content, NOT steamy steamy lemon-squeezy. Sorry. I don't write that. This takes place sometime after the end of the series, but not during school. Oh, and I should probably also mention that in this version, Hermione and Ron aren't married. **

Chapter One: The Lasting Question

Hardly anything compares to being stabbed through the neck with thin metal spikes. Of course, this wasn't the first time something like this had happened to me. They had been kind enough to leave space for breathing and talking, but swallowing was an issue. Every movement announced the presence of that portable iron maiden clasped around my neck, the _sensation _of silver in a place where it had no business being. There I lay, in a puddle of mud and rain, struggling against the darkness threatening me. I pressed my face into the puddle.

Footsteps ringing out on paving stones.

Soft laughter. It was still early in the morning.

Tiredness, beating down like the rain.

Darkness.

Light.

Constant, throbbing pain.

Darkness.

Light.

A voice.

"Sir?"

My eyes snapped open, reflected in the puddle. I no longer felt the rain on my back, but its smell hung heavy in the air. Slowly, I pushed myself into a sitting position. The world spun, and I clung tightly to the paving stones, in case I was dragged onto its hellish merry-go-round.

"Sir? Are you all right?" That voice again. I looked up. A woman, business type. Crisp shirt, skirt, jacket. Brown curly hair stuffed into a bun. She was pointing a twig at me.

I got to my feet, mildly offended that this woman thought she could take me down with a stick. Although, I thought as I assessed my current strength, that might be possible.

Fear flashed in her eyes, along with curiosity. "Don't make me Stun you," she warned.

Well, now this one was a little know-it-all, wasn't she? See a man unconscious in the street, must be dangerous. Let's point a stick at him. "Peace, woman." I held up my hands, and she lowered her twig with a sigh.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"You first, mysterious witch in a business suit lurking down back alleys." That's what the stick was. A wand. She was a witch.

Was that the ghost of a smile I saw twitch across her face? "Sorry. There's been some trouble around here lately. Strangers aren't exactly welcome."

"Name?" I didn't care about whatever trivial matters were going on in this village.

The woman frowned. "Hermione Granger, Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

"Lukas Morrow, musician and antique bookseller."

"Come with me. We're going to have to question you, I'm afraid, but you can be treated while you talk." Hermione started walking out of the alley, and I followed, taking care not to move my neck too much. It was then that I remembered there were metal bands snapped around my wrists as well. More pain, but less than the thick collar around my neck. Thinner spikes, wedged between my wrist bones. Somehow I could still bend them, but fiery pain tracked every movement.

We walked in silence, and I barely took in the sights of the village. People scurrying by, heads down, running for shelter in broad daylight. Odd. I hadn't seen behavior like that since the Dark Ages. But for the most part, I kept my eyes fixed on the shoes of Hermione, clipping along at a brisk pace. We eventually passed into the shadow of a great castle, heading inside. I was brought to an infirmary, where a nurse scuttled around, investigating my injuries and exclaiming in shock.

"This man is lucky to be alive!"

"I know, Madame Pomfrey. I'm starting to think whoever did the rest attacked him, too."

Something cold dabbed at my side. A washcloth, and then bandages wrapped around my stomach. "Can't risk magical healing. The others...didnt react well." The nurse made a noise that suggested that the other attempts at healing had been fatal.

"Mm."

"Is that all you have to say on the matter?" Hermione raised an eyebrow at me, miffed. "And...what is that around your neck?"

"None of your business," I spat, my voice coming out as practically a snarl. Hunger gnawed at my insides. It always did.

She lifted her hands. "Fine, don't cooperate. But ten people are dead and we are desperately trying to figure out who or what killed them."

Ten dead humans? That was strange. The village had been rather small, so many killings would surely stand out.

Strange, yes.

But trivial.

Her questions continued like that, clipped and direct. I tried to answer them, but when one has had their neck impaled, one finds it a bit difficult to concentrate on anything else. Hermione's eyes kept darting to the collar, the bracelets. Clearly she desperately wanted to know what they were, and why the silver gleamed with an unnatural light.

"Are you sure you can't remember anything else?" Hermione asked, defeated at my lack of answers.

I shrugged pathetically. "Sorry. It was dark and rainy." Not that it had actually prevented me from seeing anything. But she didn't need to know that.

Pausing to write a few things down on a sheet of parchment, the witch sat there, a look of sadness in her eyes. I supposed it would be hard on the authorities, so many magic-related deaths with no explanation. But this girl seemed to take it personally. I couldn't figure it out. The Ministry of Magic was all the way back in London; perhaps she had grown up here?

"Have you ever touched dark magic?" I asked suddenly. The nurse-Pomfrey-had said a name. Hogwarts. I recognized the word.

My question caught her off guard. "Wha...? Of course not! My best friend's an _Auror_, for Merlin's sake!"

Hm. Things had changed then. "Never mind," I said, shaking my head. "Shock must be getting to me."

Suspicion clouded her eyes for a moment, before her face softened. Excusing herself, Hermione left the infirmary, while Madame Pomfrey bustled around, inspecting different medicines and muttering to herself. Exhaustion and pain overwhelmed me, and I lay back on my bed, one hand clutching the cold silver of the collar.

Darkness.

**XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxX**

Hermione walked down the corridor, flipping through her notes and shaking her head. The one living witness they had found during this whole mess, and he was practically useless. They were getting nowhere, and meanwhile people kept dying.

For now, she had set up a temporary office in a classroom. Thankfully, school had let out for the summer and it was only the teachers. Parents had been eager to rush their children home. Her desk was disorganized, very unlike her. Books were piled on a corner, bits of parchment marking certain passages. The main surface area of the desk was smothered in pictures, each depicting a sight more terrifying than the last. Steeling herself, Hermione picked up the first picture, looking for comparisons between the victim and the strange man in the infirmary.

A young girl. Chest torn open, large slash marks cutting deep, down to and through the bone. Throat ripped open as well, as if something had reached into her and pulled something out that way. The image moved slightly, panning slowly around the girl's body. Her back was untouched, just stained with blood that had run in thick rivulets across her shoulders as it was forced from her neck. As far as the medical examiners from St. Mungo's had reported, the cause of death was blood loss. They were looking for signs of cursing or other dark magic as well. Hermione was reminded of an awful spell from another era of life. _Sectumsempra._ Perhaps someone else knew of it and was trying it out.

The next picture. A man this time, with an honest face. Maybe. It was hard to tell, what with the chunk carved out of the right side of his face, squashing the remnants of that eye into the ragged mess. More slash marks, on his legs as well. Great scything swipes had sliced through his hamstrings, crippling him before his throat received the same treatment as the girl.

And then there was what she had seen of Mr. Morrow. Large slashes on his stomach and side, freshly made but not nearly so devastating as the other victims'. Shallow gashes across his chest, over his heart. And that strange set of collar and bracelets. He acted as if the things hurt him.

Hermione shook her head again, sharply. Maybe the man had just gotten in a fight with his own personal enemies. He had other scars, all over his arms and chest, and a truly wicked one over his left eye. His eye had been healed magically-no one could suffer a blow like that and not have had damage to the eye; it was the only explanation-but for some reason he had left the scar. There were magical ways of getting rid of scars. Normal scars, that is. The fact remained that he wasn't innocent and pure, like all the others. He had seen battle, up close and personal. But he was the first person they had found conscious and sane. All of the others had either been dead already or died shortly after attempts at healing them. One had clung to life long enough to inform them of 'a man all on fire making sounds like a train' before his eyes had rolled back in his head.

"It just goes in circles, doesn't it?"

Hermione looked up from the pictures and her notes, smiling weakly as a scrawny man with glasses and a nervous mop of brown hair walked in. "Jared. Nice to see someone from the Department of Mysteries working on this mystery."

His face twitched in amusement, the straight, angular nose scrunching. "The evidence was getting weirder."

"Weird as in the kind your end deals with?" Hermione gestured to her stack of books. _Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dr. Faustus. _She had originally suspected a rogue vampire or werewolf, but this was too...odd. Whatever Jared did in the Department of Mysteries, it had something to do with this. And so, the fairy tales. She had learned before that there was truth to be found in them.

Hesitating, Jared nodded. "You realize I can't tell you all of it, right? I've only been authorized to, er, give the necessary details."

"If the necessary details help, I'm sure the answer can be found in one of these books."

"Right. Er. Recently we have been looking into the existence of certain creatures of a more...spiritual...nature."

Hermione raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean? Not the kind Luna looks for?" She had come to love Luna Lovegood dearly, but her friend still possessed strange ideas of what kinds of creatures were out there.

"No, no. We aren't interested in harmless beings like Gurgles or whatever it was."

"Nargles," Hermione said softly.

"Er. Yes. Nargles."

"And? What are you looking for instead?"

"Religious-oriented mythology. Angels and demons, spirits of that nature. It is the ultimate mission of the Department of Mysteries at this time, the lasting question which plagues our thoughts."

"You think demons exist? With pagan worshipers and rituals reminiscent of the Dark Ages?" Hermione couldn't help but say it so bitingly. It was ridiculous. These weren't creatures of witchcraft, like goblins and ghosts dancing on the moor. They were beings of faith, merely...representations of good and evil.

"Of course. The word 'demon' is only one step away from 'dementor', after all."

* * *

**Thank you for reading this first chapter! Please hit the review button on your way. If you have any questions, you can place them there or send me a pm.**


	2. A Lack of Magic

**Welcome to the second chapter! Again, be sure to review. If you have any questions, don't be shy! I will either answer them next chapter or by pm. And sorry it took nearly two weeks, I was neglecting my homework and suddenly realized I had three essays due the next day.**

Chapter Two: A Lack of Magic

When I awoke, the room was silent. The lights had been turned off, and the nurse had gone into her office, a small lamp glowing behind the window. Carefully, I sat up, rubbing at the collar. The matching bracelet clinked against it. It was an innocent sound, soft amidst the infirmary's stillness. A grimace contorted my face. There was a faint inscription on the collar - I had seen it right before it was clapped on. I looked into the mirror beside my bed. Nothing appeared on the collar's surface, just a smooth metal band encircling my neck. My fingers pressed against it, supposedly sliding along the unmarked surface according to the mirror, but I could feel faint ridges against my fingertips. The stillness was punctuated by a loud snarl, which I quickly managed to turn into a tremendous coughing fit.

The nurse poked her head out of her office, hurriedly padding over and looking me over critically. "Mr. Morrow, you should be asleep."

"Well, I had to cough."

"You're sitting up."

"Am I?"

"Young man, that is enough," she warned. "Now get back to sleep before you make your wounds worse."

I flopped backwards, waiting for the human to leave again. She clucked at me like a hen before moving to settle back in to her office. Eventually, the light winked out, as Madame Pomfrey presumably went to bed.

I popped back up.

Though I examined the collar and bracelets all over, the only hint of an opening I could find were a few lines that appeared to have magically welded themselves shut. There was writing on the bracelets, too, which was visible only if I looked at it sideways, and completely invisible in the mirror. Some language with a variation on Ancient Runes, it appeared. Of course, to get to any work done translating, I would have to look directly at it to figure out the runes. Which disappeared whenever I looked directly at them.

As a final experiment, I shot a fireball at the opposite wall. Or attempted to, at least. Pain gripped my neck and wrists, as if the metal bands had tightened. My hands tried to curl in on themselves, forced by the spikes digging at me. After a few seconds, the pain subsided. Gasping, I stared suspiciously at the silver, which gleamed unnaturally at me, before trying again.

My palm facing flat outwards, I willed the flame to shoot from its center. Again, the pain. Seething, I cupped my hands and decided to try something nonthreatening, a ball of flame. To light the room, nothing more. A tiny spark appeared. It sputtered weakly, reacting to the slightest touch of air, before holding steady and growing a little bigger.

I tried to drop it onto the bedsheets, and it hissed out as the collar and bracelets clamped down again.

Interesting. So I could use magic, if that tiny candle flame could be called magic. I just couldn't use anything dangerous.

Nodding to myself, I waited for the dawn.

The large windows channeled the sun into the room, illuminating every crevice of shadow. The lack of darkness made me uncomfortable. I remembered Hogwarts as something quite different than what it had apparently become.

Hermione entered the room soon after, carrying a tray of food. She set it down on the table next to me and then sat down. There looked to be a cup of tea as well as an array of the disgusting material humans deemed edible. I carefully picked up the tea, breathing in its weak scent. Herbal. I sipped it, ignoring the food on the tray. Hermione frowned at me, but didn't speak.

"If you're waiting for me to spill my life story, I'm going to have to disappoint you."

"I was waiting for you to eat breakfast, but apparently that's not going to happen."

I glanced at the witch. She was staring back at me, calm and collected, but with a measure of defiance in her eyes. I sighed. "What do you want to ask me now?"

"You said you were a musician."

"Yes." The tea was good, better than I had expected.

"Well?"

"Primarily I play medieval instruments such as the lyre, though I am quite skilled on the violin."

She nodded, as if she had surmised as much. "Who attacked you?"

I stared back, amusement flooding over my face. "Generally people tend to ask more than one casual question before jumping to their real topic."

"You would know, wouldn't you?"

My eyes narrowed. What exactly was this woman trying to figure out? She had asked the same thing yesterday. "The people who attacked me aren't who you're looking for."

"What makes you say that?" Hermione folded her arms, leaning back in her chair.

"You looked at the pictures. Do I look like I have my throat ripped out?"

"How do you know about that?" Her voice was cold, suspicion tinging every syllable.

I shrugged.

"_How do you know about the way the others were killed?_" Her alarm was evident, and I supressed a laugh. It was too easy. There were few humans, or other creatures for that matter, whose minds could deny me access. But this witch was not one of them. There were her thoughts, scrolling across her mind like a teleprompter.

"I assume you were asleep at some point?"

"Don't try to change the subject, Mr. Morrow."

"I'm not. Did you sleep?"

Hermione gave me new consideration. She still thought I was trying to change the subject, but she was willing to play along. "Yes."

"You know absolutely nothing about me beyond my name and the fact that I have musical talent. Is it unreasonable to come to the conclusion that I might have certain...skills...which include, but are not limited to, getting into a locked office in the middle of the night, while you were asleep?"

"That would make you a criminal, Mr. Morrow. Interfering in a Department investigation." Hermione's voice had regained its former calm. She was sure she had me trapped.

"Oh, no, not your office. Jared's. He's not part of your investigation."

Stunned, Hermione's thoughts scattered. "I...no, he isn't...but - he's here on his own Department's business, so you're still interfering!"

"Mm. Not if I read his personal journal. Completely independent from his work." And according to Hermione's memories, this Jared fellow had already gone out for the day.

"Stay put," she warned, getting up.

"You're not going to send him an owl."

"Really? I think I am."

"No you don't. You're baiting me to talk, because you know for a fact that Jared doesn't keep a journal."

Slowly, Hermione turned back around, watching me closely. A trace of the fear she had felt when she first met me had reappeared in her eyes. But beyond that, there was curiosity.

For a few moments we merely sat there, watching the other's movements. I finished my tea and set it back on the tray, nudging the plate of food out of the way. Eventually, Hermione shook her head and rose from her chair again, but this time she was only planning on heading to her office and doing some work. I watched her leave, creating a small fireball and bouncing it in my hand. There had been something in her mind, a memory not accessed often these days. What was it...?

And then I realized. I had seen it before, when she saw the metal bands around my neck and wrists. A small smile crept onto my face, not exactly evil, but one that was far from good intent.

Hermione knew Ancient Runes.


End file.
